The Foreign Service Journal, November 2008

68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 8 hatever else anyone might say about me, it’s a safe bet that no one ever learned more from their Foreign Service mentor than I did. I wrote down some of these lessons in my diary before my mentor told me never to keep a diary in Washington. That was one lesson. Here’s another: To get to the top, you have to be kind of a jerk, but not too much of one. Another one: 95 percent of the seventh floor’s attention is devoted to 5 percent of the world. One unusual thing about these lessons is that they were delivered not over watery, overpriced turkey sandwiches in the State Department cafeteria but at my mentor’s house near the National Cathedral. Another unusual thing: this take on the department leadership came not from, say, a burned-out consular officer but from the under secretary of State for political affairs. Or, as everyone in the Foreign Service knew him, P. We were assigned our mentors a few weeks into A-100. Like boys brought in for a dance at a girls’ school, they filed in and stood along the sides of our classroom. Halfway into this, Gray, my only A-100 friend, leaned over and mut- tered, “Seventh-floor sighting at eight o’clock.” I looked over my left shoulder and there was P, who had addressed our class the week before. He was in his early 40s, with brown hair, and was wearing a blue pinstriped suit. In other words, he looked like any other FSO. Except, of course, he wasn’t. In the State Department, he was the Alpha Male. As the woman from Human Resources ran through the match-ups, my classmates pretended to be pleased as they were paired with aviation specialists, post management officers and deputy office directors. Everyone was waiting to see who got the prize. The tension rose as the field of potential P mentees got smaller, like at the Miss America contest when they list the runners-up and the remaining contestants are thinking, “Am I going home wearing that tiara, or will I not even be third runner-up?” Except for me. After only a few weeks in the Foreign Service, I had O NE NEWLY MINTED FSO LEARNS MORE THAN SHE BARGAINED FOR IN AN UNUSUAL A-100 EXPERIENCE . W B Y M ARY G RACE M C G EEHAN Mary Grace McGeehan joined the Foreign Service in 1986, and has served in Mexico, Cambodia, Haiti and, twice, in South Africa. In Washington, she has worked on the South Africa and Vietnam desks and in the Office of the Inspector General. Her most recent assignment was as deputy chief of mission in Vientiane. She is currently on a yearlong leave of absence in Cape Town, South Africa. This story won fourth place in the Journal ’s 2008 FS Fiction Contest. FS F I CT I ON P & M E